To Have, To Hold and To Work With

St. Joseph the Worker Leads The Way to Holy Spousehood

Just because Scripture doesn’t
record any words St. Joseph spoke doesn’t mean he lived life in the background.
Surely he didn’t look on in silent passivity but rather excelled as the moral
and spiritual head of his household. The May 1 feast of St. Joseph the Worker
reminds us that he’s also an active role model — not only as a hard-working
provider but also a loving spouse.

“Joseph’s first role is to be
husband of Mary,” explains Oblate of St. Joseph Father Larry Toschi, pastor of
St. Joachim Parish in Madera, Calif. “He’s the model of husbands and the model
of fathers. Any good father exercises his fatherhood by first of all loving the
mother. By Mary and Joseph being united in love, Jesus is raised in a home
filled with love.”

Father Toschi knows whereof he
speaks. In 1985, he founded the Holy Spouses Society to help couples grow deep
in their dedication to one another, strong in their covenantal commitment to
their family and mature in the practice of their Catholic faith.

“The
Holy Spouses Society has helped us come to the understanding of how God
intended marriage to be,” says member Mary Shearer. “When we respond to
marriage in the way Joseph and Mary did, with humility, there’s a great joy.
You grow spiritually as a couple, and your family and community benefit.”

Indeed. After attending a
Life-Giving Love workshop, one of eight simple commitments the society asks of
its members, Mary and husband Alan eventually became workshop presenters at
their St. Joachim parish as well as at a neighboring parish, Our Lady of
Guadalupe in Bakersfield, Calif.

They coordinate their parish’s
additional six-week course in marriage prep, and have brought more than 200
adults to — or back to, or more fully into — the faith.

“It all basically started that
weekend we took Life-Giving Love,” says Alan. “Spiritually it has had a
tremendous effect on the family as a whole.” Their two middle children graduated
from Franciscan University and their oldest has taken vows as an Oblate of St.
Joseph.

Firm Foundation

The Holy Spouses Society is the vision of Father Toschi,
a St. Joseph scholar. He wanted to heal marriages and prepare engaged couples
to live, he says, “according to the Church’s teaching on the twofold and inseparable purpose of marriage: union in
love between husband and wife, and openness to life.”

Father
Toschi adds that he wasn’t finding those inseparable ends taught fully in the
available programs for marital preparation and enrichment. What he saw “didn’t
deal with the issue of children being appreciated as the greatest fruit of
marriage, the crown of marriage, as the Church says.” The older programs “would
not talk abut the immorality of contraception or the benefits of natural family
planning.”

That’s
why he developed the Holy Spouses Society and its Life-Giving Love weekend, and
planted it on the firm foundation of Scripture, the Catechism and Pope John
Paul II’s 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris
Consortio (The Role of the
Christian Family in the Modern World).

Oh, and he also drew from the lives
of Joseph and Mary, the two holiest spouses ever.

Members attend the Life-Giving Love
weekend, pray at least part of the Holy Spouses Rosary together weekly, and
enthrone a Holy Spouses picture in their home. They also commit to living
marriage as a vocation, valuing children as marriage’s greatest fruit, actively
supporting Church teaching on marriage’s two inseparable aspects — the unitive
and the procreative — and eschewing artificial contraception.

The Holy Spouses Rosary includes St.
Joseph in 10 mysteries and in a prayer patterned after the Hail Mary. It’s a
unique way of asking Mary and Joseph’s joint intercession.

Newlyweds and society members Marcos
and Gloria Espinoza find they’re more closely united after praying this way.
Marcos discovers little difficulties or misunderstandings that can be part of
newly married life melt away when they pray it.

“It reminds us why we got married,”
he says. “We want to be holy spouses. We’ve got to be committed to helping each
other get to God.”

Praying part of this Rosary daily is
also a key part of Tom and Michele Spencer’s prayer life together.

“I actually now have a much closer
relationship with Joseph than I had before,” says Tom, “and a lot of it has
come from that prayer.” He’s also felt led to deepen his other devotions to St.
Joseph.

The Holy Spouses Rosary inspires him
to meditate, for example, on Joseph’s role as familial guardian. “What an
awesome task, protecting and caring for the two holiest people on our planet,”
he says. “Meditating on that helps me realize how important it is for me to
realize the role of being guardian of my wife and children, and trying to do
that faithfully.”

The Spencers were married 25 years
and joyfully open to life when they attended the Life-Giving Love workshop.
(Today their 11 children range from 8 to 31 years old.) Michele says the
workshop gave them a new understanding of the role children play in a marriage
as God’s gifts. Today the Spencers actively work with the society’s Life-Giving
Love weekends. Several of their adult children have attended too.

Love Gives Life

At St. Joachim’s, Father Toschi has
made the Life-Giving Love workshop a requirement for marriage preparation. They
also must attend a six-week marriage-prep program and natural family planning
classes wherein the Holy Spouses become models for periodic abstinence for
married couples.

“Often we have couples stop having
premarital sex,” says the priest. “They prepare spiritually for the remaining
months. Many testify how their relationships deepened after they stop having
sex out of wedlock.”

Meanwhile married couples stop
contracepting.

Husbands and husbands-to-be learn to
imitate St. Joseph in myriad ways. For example, just as Joseph led his family
to Egypt when Jesus’ life was threatened by King Herod, so today’s husbands and
fathers must be ready to take action, says Tom Spencer.

“In
many respects, we’re called to do truly heroic things to protect our family,”
he adds. “We lead them where they need to be led in order to avoid falling into
today’s evil traps.” Which also come in myriad forms.

Whatever the road to becoming the
kinds of husbands and fathers St. Joseph the Worker would be proud of, men in
the Holy Spouses Society join with their wives in walking that way faithfully,
joyfully and with full faith that Christ will show them the way.

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